• by Wendy Davis , 5 hours ago

Siding with artificial intelligence (AI) company Perplexity, digital rights watchdogs are asking an appellate court to lift an injunction banning the company's shopping agent, Comet, from Amazon.

U.S. District Court Judge Maxine Chesney in the Northern District of California handed down the injunction in March, after finding that Amazon was likely to prove that Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- a 1986 anti-hacking law -- by accessing Amazon users' accounts with those users' permission, but without Amazon's authorization.

Perplexity is appealing that ruling. Last month, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily stayed the injunction while it considers the appeal.

On Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and other groups argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that Chesney's interpretation of the anti-hacking law is "antithetical to foundational principles of the open internet."

"The stakes of this dispute go far beyond a skirmish between two commercial services," the watchdogs write, elaborating that the dispute centers on whether the anti-hacking law "gives private companies like Amazon veto power over how the public accesses and engages with publicly available information on their websites."

"Open access is a hallmark of today’s internet," the groups write. "Developers like Perplexity facilitate that access by creating tools that enable users to meaningfully engage with the web."

The battle between Amazon and Perplexity dates to November, when the retailer alleged that Perplexity's Comet browser shopped for users and made purchases on their behalf -- despite Amazon's attempt to implement technological blocks, and its demand that Perplexity cease and desist.

Perplexity recently argued to the 9th Circuit that Chesney's decision marks an "alarming expansion" of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That law, introduced soon after the movie "War Games" came out, includes provisions that prohibit people from accessing web servers without authorization.

Among other arguments, Perplexity says consumers are the ones who "access" Amazon via Comet's browser.

"A Comet user accessing Amazon from her own computer is no more equivalent to Perplexity accessing Amazon than a Safari user accessing Amazon from her own computer is equivalent to Apple accessing Amazon," Perplexity wrote in papers filed last week.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and others agree, writing that Perplexity's servers don't "directly" access Amazon's.

"Comet never causes Perplexity’s servers to directly access Amazon computers, let alone protected areas of those systems," they argue. "Only the Comet user’s computer communicates with Amazon servers, and in most cases, will receive only public page content when it does so."

The American Civil Liberties Union and Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University are also siding with Perplexity.

They argue in a separate friend-of-the-court brief that a broad interpretation of the anti-hacking law would threaten journalism and research, writing that Perplexity's tool "appears to resemble other automated digital tools on which much public interest journalism and research rely."

"Imposing liability on Perplexity for the alleged conduct at issue here would expose journalists and researchers to civil and criminal penalties for using the digital tools of their trade," those groups write.

"Amazon may disagree with a user’s choice to share data the user has authorized access to, or with a user’s use of a browser extension while shopping on its website, but it may not invoke the CFAA to impose liability on that choice," the civil liberties group and Knight Institute write, using an acronym for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

"If the CFAA barred third-party access to information that users wanted to share and could access through their accounts, a platform could unilaterally decide exactly which information to keep under lock and key and which information could make it into the hands of journalists and researchers," the groups write. "Computer crime laws should not become a means for shutting down important research in the public interest."

Amazon is expected to respond to the arguments by April 22.